1-grid is a web host servicing more than 35,000 customers in South Africa. The company’s focus is on small to medium-sized businesses seeking multiple solutions in one place.
As an established provider in the South African market, 1-grid offers web and email hosting secured through SSL certificates. Services are billed as “rock solid” and “watertight”, so the web host has no margin for error when it comes to managing its IP reputation.
Outbound email processing and filtering is necessary to stay one step ahead of spammers, who are constantly searching for new resources from which to send their phishing attacks and malware.
The company needed a solution to help reduce cases where its mail server IPs were blocked by RBL providers such as Spamhaus. This issue was causing interruptions in mail delivery for customers, which impacted satisfaction with their service.
According to Sarel le Roux, Linux System Administrator at 1-grid, the time-consuming processes being used to combat the problem were ineffective: “We had to check various RBL providers manually, and set up monitoring where RBL providers allowed for API checking to ensure mail server IPs did not get listed. If they did get listed, we had to manually remove and stop spammers on our environment.”
le Roux said 1-grid was looking for a solution that met the following criteria:
“MailChannels met all our requirements and also made it very easy to implement the solution in an already-live environment, without having to cause interruption to our clients’ email service,” le Roux said.
MailChannels is a cloud-based SMTP relay service that identifies and blocks spammers to ensure reliable email delivery. With MailChannels, you can eliminate email delivery problems caused by IP address blocklisting. The system automatically shuts down compromised accounts and scripts to improve your security.
le Roux said since 1-grid started using MailChannels, the company has saved many hours of technical work in checking different RBL providers to ensure they have not been blocklisted anywhere.
“Our issue with blocklisting has been eliminated, which means our customers have a much better experience using our mail platforms,” le Roux said.
1-grid has also seen a massive decline of spam in their environment from using the MailChannels API to alert them of any potential spammers and being able to deal with it immediately.
“Ultimately, we enjoy the ease of use and the peace of mind MailChannels gives us. With the platform, we do not need to be concerned about spammers causing damage to our online reputation,” le Roux said.